


The Swans in the Evening

by unfolded73



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, Breastfeeding, F/M, Kid Fic, Motherhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-04 08:27:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12767004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unfolded73/pseuds/unfolded73
Summary: Killian and Emma have a rough night with their new baby.





	The Swans in the Evening

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, I can’t remember the last time I was nervous to post a fic, but I am straight-up nervous to post this – it is intensely personal, this little fic. Thanks to @j-philly-b for giving it a read through, and to my older kid, I guess, for being a difficult infant. The title is from “She Moved Through the Fair,” because of course it is. Warning for moderately graphic descriptions of breastfeeding, which I found strangely intimate to write for someone who writes so much smut.
> 
> Oh and P.S., I’m sticking with the name Maureen. It’s my CS kid name for good or ill.

“Little one, why won’t you sleep? Or eat? Or fucking _anything_ but fucking cry?” Emma whispered, her soothing tone of voice belying the content of her words. She paced the same circle in the nursery for at least the hundredth time, and in her sleep-deprived state, she imagined herself wearing a hole through the wood and the two of them plummeting down, landing in a shower of plaster onto the living room rug on the floor below. 

Turning back toward the door, she saw Killian standing in the hallway in his pajamas, squinting against the the lamplight of the room, one side of his hair sticking straight up from the way he’d been sleeping on it. “Do you need help, love?”

She didn’t want to need help. Killian was working at the sheriff’s station tomorrow; he had taken over all of her duties for the next several weeks, and he needed to sleep. She had to handle this herself.

“She won’t stop crying,” Emma said, her voice pitiful to her own ears. “I can’t get her to nurse. She just…” As if to punctuate that point, the five-week-old took a breath and let out an extra loud wail. Emma continued to bounce the baby in her arms, not that it was doing any good.

“Let me try,” Killian said, coming toward them.

“You have to sleep, babe.”

“I’m not going to be able to sleep anyway, knowing you’re struggling.” His lips quirked up in a half-smile. “Also, she’s very loud.”

“Shit, I’m sorry, I’ll take her downstairs—”

“Swan, let me try.” He put his hand on the baby’s back and the stump of his left arm pressed against Emma’s back. “Heaven knows you’ve done the same for me quite a number of times.”

“That doesn’t count, that’s just me shoving a boob in her mouth. Which isn’t working now, so…”

“Go lie down for a little while and let me take her.” His voice was so kind and so soothing, and somehow it made Emma both want to cry and to punch him really hard in the face.

“Fine,” she muttered, handing the baby over. Killian tucked her expertly into the crook of his arm. Maureen stopped crying for a few seconds, as if adjusting to her suddenly new perspective on the world, but soon was back to her very loud, full-throated cries.

“Go lie down,” Killian said again. “Let the bad cop have a word alone with this perpetrator.”

Emma tried not to laugh and failed, her bark of amusement raw with the tears that lurked just below the surface. “Please, you’re the good cop; _I’m_ the bad cop.” 

“Be that as it may,” he said, shooing her out of the room.

Emma went, slinking down the hall and into their bedroom. She started to close the door to muffle the noise but decided to leave it open a crack, perhaps to punish herself. She didn’t deserve to sleep while Killian was up with the baby, not when she’d bailed on him so spectacularly.

Collapsing on the bed, Emma covered her head with a pillow, pressing it against her ear. Her breasts throbbed, overfilled with the milk that her daughter had refused. That and the sound of Maureen’s cries served as the syncopated drum beat of her failure.

Interspersed among the cries, she could hear Killian singing. She’d hardly ever heard him sing before the baby was born, save for that one time she’d caught him teaching bawdy sea shanties to Henry. Now he sang all the time, lullabies that he’d admitted to surprise that he even remembered. The sound of his voice, lilting and clear, made the tears she’d been holding back finally start to flow.

The pediatrician assured her that Maureen was healthy in every possible way, that she was eating well and gaining weight and that everything was normal. Right now though, at two in the morning, Emma felt like things were anything but normal. Her body felt all wrong, like her hormones were completely out of whack. Clearly her baby knew it too, otherwise, she wouldn’t cry so inconsolably for someone to come save her from such a complete failure of a mother.

She was so wrapped up in her own self-recriminations and misery that it took a minute for Emma to realize that gradually, a calm began to settle over the house. The baby’s cries slowed and slowed and finally stopped, leaving only Killian’s singing. Emma felt her shoulders relax for the first time in hours. She lay still and breathed and listened to the sound of her husband’s voice. After a few more minutes the singing stopped too, and then she heard shuffling footsteps approach the door.

“Emma?” Killian whispered softly, testing if she was awake.

“Yeah?” 

“Now that she’s calmed down, would you try again to feed her? She’s rooting against my chest to no avail.”

Emma snorted, rolling over. “There’s a pirate’s chest joke there, but I’m too tired to come up with it.” She beckoned to him. “Bring her here.”

Killian put Maureen in the middle of the bed and sat down gingerly as Emma positioned herself on her side with the baby facing her. She rucked up her t-shirt, shifting herself and the baby into place. It was harder to get her to latch this way and therefore it was a risk, but Emma was too tired to move or think coherently about that. After a couple of false starts, Maureen got her mouth around Emma’s nipple and latched on. A moment of pain was followed by a rush of relief as Emma’s milk let down, and she released a long sigh.

“Okay?” Killian asked, stretching out on his side of the bed, the baby between them. 

“Yeah,” she breathed. “So far so good.”

Killian caressed Maureen’s tiny hand, letting her grip his finger, then kissed the baby’s head softly. “She just needed to calm down; she’d worked herself into too much of a lather to nurse.”

“I guess,” Emma said, and her voice audibly trembled. _Dammit._

“Oh, love, don’t cry,” Killian said, reaching out to stroke her hair. “It’s okay.”

“I’m terrible at this,” she muttered, her hand cradling the baby’s head. 

“You really aren’t.” He leaned over and kissed her forehead. “We’re just having a rough night.”

Killian’s reassurances just made her feel more upset. She didn’t want to be reassured, she thought as she watched the baby’s jaw work, felt the rhythmic pulls against her breast and tingle of milk flowing. She wanted him to confirm that while maybe she was a good sheriff and could fling magical lightning from her fingers when the situation called for it, mothering an infant was beyond her capabilities.

“Do you know what thought went through my head while she was crying?” she asked him after a while.

“What?”

“I was standing there in the nursery, bouncing her and rocking her and none of it was working, and she just kept squalling and I was so tired, like _deliriously_ tired and … for a second, I had a clear image in my head of just… dropping her on the floor. Not that I wanted to do that or would _ever_ ,” she added hastily. “But suddenly I could see myself doing it. Dropping her.” Killian continued to stroke her hair, listening and saying nothing. “I think I understand for the first time how people end up abusing babies. Not sympathizing with it — I mean, it’s awful. Monstrous. But I see now where those impulses come from.”

“You would never do that, Emma.”

“I know. But… I didn’t know this would be so hard. I love her so much, but this is really hard.” A tear dripped off the end of her nose and down onto the pillow under her head.

Killian didn’t respond to that, didn’t try to reassure her or argue with her. He just lay next to her and continued to listen.

“I’ll think to myself, why did we do this? Which is horrible; we wanted a baby for so long. How many months was I completely crushed when I got my period? And now I’m begrudging her existence? What kind of evil person am I?”

“You’re a sleep-deprived person,” Killian responded, “and your body is still recovering from a massive trauma.”

Emma glanced down at her abdomen. “Massive is right,” she said with an eye roll.

“Stop it.”

Maureen’s mouth popped off of her breast, and Emma looked down to see her daughter had dozed off. “Oh no, you don’t,” she muttered, scooping up the baby against her chest and rolling onto her back and then onto her other side. “You’re not going to leave me lopsided tonight.” Now with Maureen up against the bed rail they’d installed for this purpose, Emma worked to get her latched onto the other breast. The movement had awoken the baby enough that she soon was suckling again without any fuss.

“Will it bother you if I hold you?” Killian asked. 

“No, but you should go to sleep.”

She heard him shift, and then felt the press of his firm chest against her back, his knees folding into the backs of her knees. His hand came up to rest gently on her upper arm. “Would it help if I said it will get easier?”

“No.”

He paused. “Would it help if I said that I love you more today than I’ve ever loved you?”

Emma closed her eyes against another surge of tears and nodded.

“Every day I think I can’t possibly love you any more than I already do, and then you prove me wrong.” She felt his lips press against the back of her head. “You’re a wonderful mother,” he whispered. “And a wonderful wife.”

Silence settled, and Emma listened to the suckling noises of the baby. She ran her finger down Maureen’s cheek, enjoying the softness of her skin, leaning over and inhaling that wonderful baby smell from the top of her downy head.

“I’m supposed to go in for a doctor’s appointment Friday. Can you stay with Maureen while I do that?” she asked.

“Of course. Everything all right?”

“Yeah, it’s routine. It’s that six-week checkup, remember?”

She felt him shake his head. “Sorry, I don’t.”

Emma sighed heavily. “It’s when the doctor checks to make sure everything down there is healed up, and if so she’ll give me the all-clear for sex.”

“Six weeks, right,” Killian said evenly.

Raising an eyebrow he couldn’t see, she asked, “You’re not excited?”

His chuckle rumbled against her back. “I’m a bit too tired to be excited right now, but I assure you I am hypothetically very excited.”

“I feel like I can’t remember what wanting sex feels like,” she said.

He patted her arm. “Between the nursing and the lack of sleep, I can’t say I’m surprised. There’s no rush, darling.”

“You’re going to wear out your hand.”

Killian laughed softly again. “It wouldn’t be the first time. All I mean is we don’t have to do anything you aren’t ready for.”

Maureen unlatched from her breast with an audible pop again, and Emma looked down into her sleeping face. Her jaw hung slack, a dribble of milk running from the corner of her mouth. Smiling fondly, Emma eased away from her and pulled her t-shirt down. 

“Shall I take her back to her crib?”

“I don’t know if we should tempt fate.”

Killian reached over and lifted the baby’s hand, letting it drop. “I think it’s safe.” He got up and made his way around the bed, carefully scooping her into his arms. “Back in a tic.”

Emma rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling, listening for Killian’s murmuring as he put the baby to bed. If she weren’t so exhausted, she’d get up and go watch him. She loved the gentle way he touched their daughter, his large hand dwarfing her tiny body. The way he looked at her with such softness that it would melt the hardest of hearts. And, of course, the way he sang to her.

Her thoughts drifted back to their interrupted conversation, and by the time Killian returned, crawling under the covers with a grunt and pulling her into his arms, Emma was very nearly laughing at herself. “So here’s how neurotic I am. At the same time, I don’t want you to be interested in sex because _I’m_ not terribly interested in sex, but I also _do_ want you to be interested in sex because I’m freaking out that you might not find me attractive any more.”

“Swan, aside from anything else, I promise I still find you very attractive.” His hand found the jut of her hip bone, and at his urging she slung her thigh over his legs, snuggling even closer.

“I’m also worried that things down there might not be… that my vagina might be… not as good.” She felt her cheeks flush, and was glad that the only light was the one in the hallway, left on for the next time one of them needed to stumble to the baby’s room.

“You had a baby long before I became acquainted with that part of your anatomy, and I can assure you it is more than ‘good.’” His words slurred a little bit, sleep starting to pull him under.

“I was young then. This time, I don’t know.”

“You are bound and determined to worry when you could be sleeping, aren’t you?” 

Emma kissed his chest in apology. “Sorry, I’ll shut up.”

Feeling him lift his head, Emma tilted her neck back to meet his eyes. “There are few universal truths in this world, my love, but one of them is surely that I will always find sex with you to be an earth-shattering, transcendent experience that absolutely flattens me.”

She blinked at him a few times. “Wow.”

Killian’s head dropped back onto the pillow. 

“Transcendent,” Emma said.

“Aye. Now go to sleep, woman, and allow me to rest up for our eventual…”

“Transcendent, earth-shattering experience?”

He chuckled. “Aye.”

She continued to watch him as he closed his eyes and his breathing evened out. “I love you,” she whispered.

“I love you, too, Swan.”

“And I love our daughter.”

“I know you do.” He squeezed her arm comfortingly.

Emma laid her head back on her husband’s chest and closed her eyes. And in the quiet house, everyone slept.


End file.
